Radio Free Asia (RFA) has said it is suspending its news operations due to the US government shutdown and the Trump administration’s cuts to government-funded news services.
“RFA has been forced to suspend all remaining news content production – for the first time in its 29 years of existence,” said Bay Fang, RFA’s president and CEO, in a statement.
“In an effort to conserve limited resources on hand and preserve the possibility of restarting operations should consistent funding become available, RFA is taking further steps to responsibly shrink its already reduced footprint,” she said.
RFA was founded nearly three decades ago to report on China and other Asian countries without independent media.
It has been operating with a skeleton staff the past few months, primarily producing a few stories online as the administration sought to choke off its funding. Donald Trump’s team has contended that operations like RFA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America are poorly run and a waste of government resources.
Long a thorn in Beijing’s side, RFA’s closure comes after the US president met Chinese leader Xi Jinping on a trip to Asia.
Radio Free Asia will begin shutting down overseas bureaus, laying off and paying severance to staff members, most of whom have been on unpaid leave since last March, Fang said, leaving open the possibility that the organisation could restart operations in the future.
“However drastic these measures may seem, they position RFA, a private corporation, for a future in which it would be possible to scale up and resume providing accurate, uncensored news for people living in some of the world’s most closed places,” Fang said.
With its own journalists and contractors in Asia, RFA has reported aggressively on stories some governments don’t want to see – the repression of Uyghurs in China, the aftermath of the 2021 military coup in Myanmar and the plight of defectors in North Korea. The outlet had been growing; visitors to its website increased 20% between 2023 and 2024.
Shutting the broadcaster, which produced news in multiple Asian languages, “is a gift to dictators like Xi Jinping” especially “at a time when Beijing has worked quite assiduously to control what stories can and can’t get told the country”, said Sophie Richardson, co-executive director of the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China under president Joe Biden, wrote on X that shuttering RFA was a “major mistake” that “will prevent us from telling the truth to the Chinese people and countering Beijing’s propaganda.”
RFE/Radio Liberty, similar to RFA as a private corporation funded by the government, said its own news services were staying up, “and we plan to continue reaching our audiences for the foreseeable future”, the organisation said this week. It operates in eastern Europe, central Asia and the Middle East. The service had launched its own lawsuit against the administration.
RFE/Radio Liberty says it received its last federal funding in September. It is operating on reserves, and has taken cost-cutting steps like cutting contracts with freelancers, reducing programming and placing some staff members on partially paid leave.
It was not immediately clear why the two organisations are taking different approaches. While having the same governing and funding structure, RFA and RFE/Radio Liberty are headquartered in North America and Europe respectively, and are governed under different labour laws.
Voice of America, which has concentrated on providing news about the United States to audiences in other countries, had been operating on a very limited basis since its funding was cut off and has essentially stopped due to the government shutdown. Some employees have sued to block the administration’s plans.
With Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
